Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by John Hechinger.
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First Edition: September 2017
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Names: Hechinger, John (John Edward), author.
Title: True gentlemen : the broken pledge of America’s fraternities / John Hechinger.
Description: First edition. | New York, NY : PublicAffairs, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017008179 (print) | LCCN 2017030026 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396837 (ebook) | ISBN 9781610396820 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Sigma Alpha Epsilon. | Greek letter societies—United States. | Male college students—United States—Conduct of life. | Racism in higher education—United States. | College students—Alcohol use—United States. | Hazing—United States. | Misogyny—United States. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Men’s Studies. | EDUCATION / Students & Student Life.
Classification: LCC LJ75.S25 (ebook) | LCC LJ75.S25 H43 2017 (print) | DDC
371.8/5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017008179
ISBNs: 978-1-61039-682-0 (hardcover); 978-1-61039-683-7 (ebook)
E3-20170819-JV-NF
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
PART ONE VICE
1Drinking Games
2Broken Pledges
3Sexual Assault Expected
4The SAE Law
PART TWO LEGACY
5Sing, Brothers, Sing
6Discriminating Gentlemen
7Old Row
PART THREE REBIRTH
8The Phoenix
9The Lions
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Index
For Ricki and Rachel
The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.
—SIGMA ALPHA EPSILON’S CREED, JOHN WALTER WAYLAND, 1899
INTRODUCTION
On a sultry August morning in the Port of Miami, seven hundred fraternity brothers streamed onto the Majesty of the Seas, a cruise ship with nine bars and a “Vegas-style Casino Royale.” In flip-flops and backward baseball caps, rolling hip-tall suitcases stuffed with blazers and bow ties, they came to learn the ways of “The True Gentleman,” the solemn creed of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, one of the largest college fraternities in America. “The True Gentleman,” a 123-word passage all members must memorize, amounts to a secular Golden Rule drenched with nostalgia. The creed stresses propriety, self-control, frankness, sincerity, sympathy, humility, and respect for the rights and feelings of others. The True Gentleman is “a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.”
This cruise represented the modern incarnation of an eighty-year-old tradition, SAE’s annual leadership school. Here, recent initiates would learn how to be social chairmen and chapter presidents—and one day, perhaps, become politicians and chief executive officers. As is often the case with the activities of fraternities, this event might not look good to the outside world. “A booze cruise,” a fraternity critic could call it. In reality, SAE has held the school at sea since 2006 because it was easier to control drinking. Once aboard, only those twenty-one and older had bracelets letting them buy alcohol. On the Royal Caribbean excursion, the brothers could also be held captive in conference rooms during daylong classes.
The cruise will long be remembered for its role in violating, in every sense, SAE’s own creed. Four years earlier, on this same ship, a few men, perhaps in a hot tub or in hushed voices in their cabins, shared a song, its melody from a childhood sing-along, “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands.”
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
There will never be a nigger in SAE,
You can hang him from a tree,
But he can never sign with me,
There will never be a nigger in SAE.
The song traveled from the Caribbean to the University of Oklahoma, where it was repeated behind closed doors at its SAE chapter before going viral in March 2015 when two drunk members on a bus were caught singing it on a cell-phone video that horrified the world.
Just five months later, on the August leadership cruise, members of SAE—including several dozen African Americans—gathered in the ship’s Broadway-style main theater to hear Bill Dorfman, a motivational speaker and dentist-to-the-stars known for his on-air makeovers on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Dorfman dropped the names of celebrities such as Lindsay Lohan and Jessica Simpson. He showed a picture of his rippling fifty-something physique featured in a men’s magazine. He recounted how he turned a knack for self-promotion into a $200-million-a-year business and stormed the New York Times best-seller list by buying copies of his own book. “People always say money doesn’t make you happy!” he thundered into a microphone. “I say, b.s. It makes you really happy!” The crowd roared, perhaps forgetting that the True Gentleman “does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements.”
Later in the voyage, a thirty-five-year-old father of four daughters took the stage to teach “Etiquette for a True Gentleman.” He was known as “Boomer,” though his full name was Blaine K. Ayers, and he held the grand title of “Eminent Supreme Recorder of SAE”—what most organizations would call executive director. Ayers, a blond, boyish figure, a former homecoming king who married a sorority girl, wore a crisp gray suit, white shirt, and baby-blue bow tie. “Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot,” he said, the soft vowels of his native Kentucky floating like a mist from a bygone era. A gentleman, he said, opens doors for a lady. He rises when a woman approaches a table. He stands to her right on a sidewalk. At parties, he holds a drink in his left hand so the right is free to greet others. No matter how hot, he never loosens his necktie or removes his suit jacket. He pens handwritten thank-you notes. “You should be a better man than you were when you woke up in the morning,” Ayers told his protégés.
Another class revealed the unholy trinity of fraternity life: racial insensitivity, dangerous drinking, and misogyny. Brandon Weghorst, the fraternity’s communications chief, called it: “PR Nightmare: Our Public Image Exposed.” He flashed photos on a screen, a growing collection he kept as a cautionary tale for occasions like these: Strippers in front of a chapter house. A Confederate battle flag. A brother pouring vodka down a young woman’s throat. “Rush SAE” painted across naked breasts (a fraternity recruitment phenomenon called “rush boobs”). And a couple of unofficial creeds, painted on rocks and walls, the proud handiwork of the late-teenage mind uncluttered with ideals of honor and virtue: “SAE. Work Hard. Play Hard. Stay Hard.” and “SAE: We do bitches!! Pulling hoes since 1856.”
FEW AMERICAN INSTITUTIONS face as wide a chasm between high-minded ideals and on-the-ground reality as the college fraternity. It is among the many contradictions of the Greek-letter movement, which is as old as the United States itself. Fraternities once faced near-universal condemnation from college presidents, who viewed the secretive brotherhoods as a threat to morality and scholarship; yet today, fraternities are, more often than not, partners with school administrators who praise them for fostering philanthropy, community, and leadership—even as alcohol-soaked Greek parties generate no end of injuries and embarrassing headlines. Women now dominate higher education in numbers and accomplishment, yet these all-male organizations control social lives with their exclusive parties and face complaints of misogyny and sexual assault. Fraternities profess to judge men solely by their character, yet they have long been criticized for fostering divisions of class and race. Their reputations are in tatters, yet fraternities are more popular than ever. They lash out at critics; yet in private they are often withering in their self-criticism and eager for reform.
Over two years, I traveled across the country, trying to understand the jarring conflict between fraternities’ words and deeds. I examined their darkest moments, the brutality hidden in basements and bedrooms, shielded by covered windows and student “lookouts” and denied long after overwhelming evidence had revealed the truth. I visited chapter houses at state colleges with big-time football teams, Ivy League schools with pipelines to Wall Street, and smaller colleges with accomplished alumni who dominate Main Street businesses across America. I joined fraternity men and sorority women as they cruised in the Caribbean and had cocktails with members of Congress at a Capitol Hill hotel. I saw a billionaire fly in and out of a meeting in Southern California on his private jet, addressing members before they debated a contentious plan to make their chapters safer. I witnessed a national president confronting an ugly history of hazing and racism, and I watched an unlikely fraternity man devote what could be the last year of his life to keeping a promise to a troubled chapter he helped transform into a national model.
At many schools, especially the public universities that award most bachelor’s degrees, the Greek-letter groups that dominate the physical and social landscape have a greater influence on students’ lives than any academic department. Visit a college with a flourishing fraternity scene, and you’ll find an “Office of Greek Life,” where administrators endorse materials that make fraternity gatherings sound as innocent as a square dance. Stroll along fraternity row, and you’ll find jaw-dropping mansions that look like the set of Gone with the Wind. Greek organizations own $3 billion in real estate on eight hundred US campuses, offering some of the most expensive and sought-after housing and dividing campuses into haves and have-nots. Their members often form a voting bloc that gives them unrivaled power in student government and, later, a lifelong social network that can catapult them ahead of less-connected classmates. About 40 percent of US presidents have belonged to fraternities, including Gerald Ford (Delta Kappa Epsilon [DKE], University of Michigan), the two Presidents Bush (both DKE, Yale), Ronald Reagan (Tau Kappa Epsilon [TKE], Eureka College), and Bill Clinton (Phi Beta Sigma, honorary member). Donald Trump, though frequently called out for the worst kind of frat-boy behavior, never belonged to a chapter. Thirty-nine percent of senators in the 113th US Congress and one-fourth of US representatives belonged to fraternities. So did one-third of all US Supreme Court justices; and business titans such as Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett (Alpha Sigma Phi) and Walmart’s late founder, Sam Walton (Beta Theta Pi). There’s even a lobbying arm, the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee known as FratPAC, that opposed national anti-hazing legislation and supported a bill that would make it more difficult for colleges to investigate sexual assault.
Fraternity brothers themselves tend to cherish their experiences, viewing their time in chapter houses as among the most meaningful of their college years. The organizations promote close friendships, no small matter at larger, more impersonal universities. Members learn to govern themselves, electing officers who oversee budgets, plan events, and punish those who break the rules. Joining up can often be a stepping-stone to student government. Like corporate chief executives on the philanthropy circuit, leaders raise more than $20 million a year, often through dances and parties that can be the pinnacle of the social calendar. A 2014 survey of 30,000 undergraduates by Gallup and Purdue University found that members of Greek-letter groups reported higher levels of “well-being,” such as having a sense of purpose and community and strong relationships with friends and family. More than other students, they believed their institutions prepared them for life after college, and in an emotional response significant to college presidents hungry for donations, they expressed a closer attachment to their alma maters. The Indiana University Foundation, which raises money for the public college, reported that Greeks, which compose 19 percent of its database of alumni, made 60 percent of all donations.
To a degree not widely understood, fraternities pioneered the American conception of college, a place where extracurricular life can eclipse scholarship. This is a book about what it means for students, parents, universities—and America—that fraternities play such an outsize role in higher education. The historical legacy of fraternities in part shapes our very idea of coming of age, and the matter of how we reform—or abolish—them cuts to the core of higher education’s mission. To quote one noted SAE brother, the past is never dead. It’s not even past.
Much has been written about fraternities’ misbehavior, which seems as inevitable as fall leaves and tuition increases. Insurance companies have rated fraternities just above toxic-waste dumps because of claims related to drinking, hazing, and sexual assault. There have been journalistic exposés, as well as shocking memoirs of fraternity life. Historians, sociologists, and other academics have offered illuminating accounts of the roots and culture of Greek life. But the contradictions of fraternities remain rich territory for exploration. I offer the perspective of an outsider who never belonged to a fraternity; a concerned father of a daughter still in college; a reporter who has exa
mined thousands of pages of court and disciplinary records; and a chapter-house guest who listened to the opinions of scores of members themselves. They often complained that they are stereotyped, blamed for the behavior of the worst among them. In the end, though, it seemed more than fair to measure fraternities against their own standards, their own words, and the highest values they seek to promote.
The current moment represents a turning point for fraternities. Several forces have conspired to challenge Greek-letter organizations: social media and cell-phone videos have pierced their secrecy; litigation has led national offices either to distance themselves to avoid liability or to consider enforcing codes of behavior on disparate chapters that have traditionally operated with little centralized authority; and an increasingly diverse campus has led to more intense questioning of fraternities’ exclusivity. Still, the rise of Trump has revealed a deep well of white, male resentment that could provoke a backlash against any change.
The roughly seventy historically white, male, Greek-letter organizations have 4 million living alumni and represent the most venerable and dominant force in the movement. Their chapters, most of which belong to the North-American Interfraternity Conference, have more than 380,000 undergraduate members, a 50 percent increase over the last decade and just short of a 1990 record. One in six men who attend a four-year college full-time belongs to a fraternity. With their campus partners, the traditionally white sororities, fraternities form a bloc that can command more power and resources than any other student group. African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, and other minority groups, excluded from fraternities at the movement’s inception, have created their own Greek organizations. Although they lack the population, money, and influence of the historically white chapters, these fraternities and sororities further magnify the presence of Greek life. At the University of Alabama, for example, fraternities and sororities make up 36 percent of students. Some of the country’s most elite colleges, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Dartmouth, are Greek strongholds, where one-half or more of male students belong to a fraternity.
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